The Luncheon

The Luncheon at the Yale University Art Gallery, dated 1895, places Vuillard within the French tradition of table scenes that runs from Chardin's quiet domestic preparations through Impressionist and Post-Impressionist treatments of the meal as a social and pictorial subject. His relationship to Chardin was explicit and acknowledged: critics from his own lifetime recognized a temperamental affinity between the two painters, both devoted to the domestic world of middle-class French life, both finding the simplest objects and the quietest domestic rituals sufficient vehicles for the highest pictorial attention. But where Chardin worked within the optical conventions of his time — tonal modeling, spatial recession, a still life tradition that separated objects from their human context — Vuillard compressed figure and setting into the democratic surface of his Nabi method. The luncheon table's white cloth, punctuated by the specific colors of tableware and food, becomes one compositional element among the figures, furnishings, and walls that together constitute the painting's visual world. Yale's early collecting of French modernism placed this canvas in an American academic environment that would shape several generations of art historical engagement with the Nabi movement.

The table functions as a horizontal stage across the lower half of the composition, its white cloth punctuated by the colours of tableware and food. Figures above are depicted in the muted, close-valued tones that characterise Vuillard's dining room light. The surface treatment throughout maintains his small, directional touch.